NY Marathon director had hard choice – and harsh critics

Mary Wittenberg, president of the New York Road Runners, speaks at a news conference Friday after New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg canceled Sunday's New York City Marathon. At left is Howard Wolfson, deputy mayor for government affairs and communication; at right is George Hirsch, chairman of the board of New York Road Runners. LOUIS LANZANO, AP

NEW YORK - Mary Wittenberg, director of the New York City Marathon, arrived at the event's exposition at the Jacob K. Javits Center on Thursday with a message for people clamoring for the cancellation of the race.

"This isn't about running," she said. "This is about helping the city."

A day later, Wittenberg came to a painful realization: Many in the city - and many of the runners from around the world who paid and trained for the race - did not see the marathon as a help, but rather as an insensitive romp through the city's streets at a time when millions throughout the region are suffering the consequences of a natural disaster.

So not long after joining city officials in a decision to cancel the marathon, Wittenberg, the chief executive of New York Road Runners, walked through Central Park not far from where the race's finish line would have been. Usually perky and bright-eyed, Wittenberg - a former high school cheerleader who is known for her unyielding pep - looked pale and tired. She appeared shaken, on the verge of tears.

"It's crushing and really difficult," she said in a subdued voice. "One of the toughest decisions we ever made."

Wittenberg, a former elite marathoner who took over as chief executive of Road Runners in 2005, has come to believe in the virtues of the sport and her club, that running can lift the depressed and galvanize a city. In her many trips abroad to spread the gospel of New York Road Runners, she has seen firsthand how distance runners resonate in communities from Ethiopia to England.

She witnessed it in New York in 2001, when, only two months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the marathon was staged in patriotic splendor. This was the first time since 1970 that the race had been canceled.

But this week offered something altogether different.

"It was a stupendously bad decision to hold this race, and the fact that they pulled the plug at the last minute only hurts the very people they tried to help in the first place," said Alan Vinegrad, a former U.S. attorney who has run six marathons, including New York City twice. "The only justification they had to run this race, if there was ever a justification, was to avoid the expense and inconvenience of all the out-of-towners who traveled to New York for the marathon. Now they are the people that are left out to dry because they are in the city already. For those people, it's a financial disaster that could easily have been avoided."

Wittenberg was already in a tough spot going into this marathon. She had taken the brunt of the criticism when Road Runners said in late August that the group would no longer transport runners' belongings from the start on Staten Island to the finish area in Central Park. Some runners at a race in Harlem shortly after that decision booed her. Online, a petition against the decision was gaining momentum.

Though that policy to do away with the baggage transport was quickly modified because of heavy opposition, it was an example of how Wittenberg had become a lightning rod of criticism because of her vision for the organization - a group that has attained outsize influence in the global running community.

The organization's marquee event is the marathon, but Wittenberg sees the mission of the organization to be much broader. She wants people everywhere to get off their couches and into their sneakers to run. And since taking over as chief executive, she has been successful at that.

Under her watch, the New York City Marathon field has grown nearly 30 percent, to 47,500 from 37,000, and is the largest in the world. But some local runners say she has destroyed the intimacy of the sport and has failed to properly serve her grass-roots constituents.

That was nothing, though, compared with what some critics were saying about her this week as the marathon grew near and the decision to move forward with the race was reiterated by her and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

"This is an epic fail for Bloomberg and Mary Wittenberg," Luisa Lisciandrello of Brooklyn wrote at the bottom of an online petition at www.change.org. As of Friday evening, the petition had garnered nearly 30,000 people in barely a day who supported postponing the race.

Lisciandrello called the mayor and Wittenberg "the personification of greed and evil" because they dared to waste city resources on the race when "people are still digging dead bodies out of the mud."

Some people online and some runners registered for the race called Wittenberg insensitive. Others said she had not called off the race because Road Runners were in it for the money.

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